Posted on 08/12/2008 5:48:45 AM PDT by Tolik
Hard power trumps soft power — but power power trumps both
Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia.
The Home Front
The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stink of Stalinism, and is indeed cloaked as a sort of humanitarian intervention on behalf of beleaguered Ossetians.
There will be no Russian demonstrations about an “illegal war,” much less nonsense about “blood for oil,” but instead rejoicing at the payback of an uppity former province that felt its Western credentials somehow trumped Russian tanks. How ironic that the Western heartthrob, the old Marxist Mikhail Gorbachev, is now both lamenting Western encouragement of Georgian “aggression,” while simultaneously gloating over the return of Russian military daring.
Sinister Timing
Russia’s only worry is the United States, which currently has a lame-duck president with low approval ratings, and is exhausted after Afghanistan and Iraq. But more importantly, America’s attention is preoccupied with a presidential race, in which “world citizen” Barack Obama has mesmerized Europe as the presumptive new president and soon-to-be disciple of European soft power.
Better yet for Russia, instead of speaking with one voice, America is all over the map with three reactions from Bush, McCain, and Obama — all of them mutually contradictory, at least initially. Meanwhile, the world’s televisions are turned toward the Olympics in Beijing. The autocratic Chinese, busy jailing reporters and dissidents, are not about to say an unkind word about Russian intervention. If anything, the pageantry at their grandiose stadiums provides welcome distractions for those embarrassed over the ease with which Russia smothered Georgia.
Comeuppance
Most importantly, Putin and Medvedev have called the West’s bluff. We are sort of stuck in a time-warp of the 1990s, seemingly eons ago in which a once-earnest weak post-Soviet Russia sought Western economic help and political mentoring. But those days are long gone, and diplomacy hasn’t caught up with the new realities. Russia is flush with billions. It serves as a rallying point and arms supplier to thugs the world over that want leverage in their anti-Western agendas. For the last five years, its foreign policy can be reduced to “Whatever the United States is for, we are against.”
The geopolitical message is clear to both the West and the former Soviet Republics: don’t consider NATO membership (i.e., do the Georgians really think that, should they have been NATO members, any succor would have been forthcoming?).
Together with the dismal NATO performance in Afghanistan, the Georgian incursion reveals the weakness of the Atlantic Alliance. The tragic irony is unmistakable. NATO was given a gift in not having made Georgia a member, since otherwise an empty ritual of evoking Article V’s promise of mutual assistance in time of war would have effectively destroyed the Potemkin alliance.
The new reality is that a nuclear, cash-rich, and energy-blessed Russia doesn’t really worry too much whether its long-term future is bleak, given problems with Muslim minorities, poor life-expectancy rates, and a declining population. Instead, in the here and now, it has a window of opportunity to reclaim prestige and weaken its adversaries. So why hesitate?
Indeed, tired of European lectures, the Russians are now telling the world that soft power is, well, soft. Moscow doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, the European Union, the World Court at the Hague, or any finger-pointing moralist from Geneva or London. Did anyone in Paris miss any sleep over the rubble of Grozny?
More likely, Putin & Co. figure that any popular rhetoric about justice will be trumped by European governments’ concern for energy. With just a few tanks and bombs, in one fell swoop, Russia has cowered its former republics, made them think twice about joining the West, and stopped NATO and maybe EU expansion in their tracks. After all, who wants to die for Tbilisi?
Russia does not need a global force-projection capacity; it has sufficient power to muscle its neighbors and thereby humiliate not merely its enemies, but their entire moral pretensions as well.
Apologists in the West
The Russians have sized up the moral bankruptcy of the Western Left. They know that half-a-million Europeans would turn out to damn their patron the United States for removing a dictator and fostering democracy, but not more than a half-dozen would do the same to criticize their long-time enemy from bombing a constitutional state.
The Russians rightly expect Westerners to turn on themselves, rather than Moscow — and they won’t be disappointed. Imagine the morally equivalent fodder for liberal lament: We were unilateral in Iraq, so we can’t say Russia can’t do the same to Georgia. (As if removing a genocidal dictator is the same as attacking a democracy). We accepted Kosovo’s independence, so why not Ossetia’s? (As if the recent history of Serbia is analogous to Georgia’s.) We are still captive to neo-con fantasies about democracy, and so encouraged Georgia’s efforts that provoked the otherwise reasonable Russians (As if the problem in Ossetia is our principled support for democracy rather than appeasement of Russian dictatorship).
From what the Russians learned of the Western reaction to Iraq, they expect their best apologists will be American politicians, pundits, professors, and essayists — and once more they will not be disappointed. We are a culture, after all, that after damning Iraqi democracy as too violent, broke, and disorganized, is now damning Iraqi democracy as too conniving, rich, and self-interested — the only common denominator being whatever we do, and whomever we help, cannot be good.
Power-power
We talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power, hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.
Russia understands that Europe needs its natural gas, that the U.S. not only must be aware of its own oil dependency, but, more importantly, the ripples of its military on the fragility of world oil supplies, especially the effects upon China, Europe, India, and Japan. When one factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia, the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives.
Paralysis
Military intervention is out of the question. Economic sanctions, given Russia’s oil and Europe’s need for it, are a pipe dream. Diplomatic ostracism and moral stricture won’t even save face.
Instead, Europe — both western and eastern — along with the United States and the concerned former Soviet Republics need to sit down, conference, and plot exactly how these new democracies are to maintain their independence and autonomy in the next decade. Hopefully, they will reach the Franklinesque conclusion that “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Looking forward to hearing McCain utter these words..It would be so Churchill if he did...
Putin and his generals know that we won't do this. We will not challenge Russia militarily on the european landmass..
Yes, and that is the enzyme that will slowly dissolve the EU if the current lack of energy exploration is allowed to prevail.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
After Georgia, I'll be surprised if any one has the nerve to mention "soft power" again. It's absolutely useless.
As for "power power," that's the reason to develop alternative energy, not global warming, climate change nonsense. Develop alternative energy and all other sources of energy to collapse the oil and natural gas market. Let them eat oil and natural gas. Only then would economic sanctions take effect. Our economy does well with cheap energy too. We need to export energy. We can't sustain all the importing that we do and empower our adversaries.
So I guess it would be normal if Mexico sent troops into California and Texas to protect all the illegals they sent in.
And the Muslims of course, could send in troops next time France cracks down against the rioting youths.
They are right here on FR!
This war is done. Georgia is gone.
We just have to decide where we will draw the line. The Ukraine will be next. Do we fight their or Poland? Or maybe Germany?
He’s wrong, they haven’t called our bluff, they have taken our bait.
Two centuries in and the Russians continue to play The Great Game...
“...however...nice post in spirit...to hear that sorta mettle from a woman is encouraging...I respect that.”
Not just a woman, a soldier. (Retired Army.)
Hey, NOBODY prays for peace harder than a service member. But what you said has a lot of merit, too. We’ve been such p*ssies for so long that I don’t think half of us conservatives know which end is up anymore, and ALL of the socialists in this country are absolutely clueless...while rooting for the wrong team!
Hopefully McCain will be in the position to kick some arse. I think when it comes to war and national security (as a whole) he won’t let us down. Not sure what President Bush will do between now and then.
(Oops! I hear the ‘McCain-Bashing Secure the Borders Freepers’ poised over their keyboards, ready to strike, LOL!)
I pray you’re right!
susie
We tried at least three or four times pointing the camera at the house and the camera refused to snap the picture, and again, when the camera was pointed away from the house, the camera would snap.
We never did get a picture of Stalin's house.
Talk about spooky!!!!!
Maybe God was trying to tell you something.........
NATO therefore needed a new mission and what better target than Yugoslavia, so in violation of the NATO charter NATO, led by President William Jefferson Clinton, bombed tiny Yugoslavia that did not have weapons of mass destruction, never attacked the United States nor any NATO country, nor was it ever a threat to us.
But when the Serbs sent in their forces to protect their sovereignty in Kosovo, the White House supported the jihadist war criminals who have taken over the government.
Today, Kosovo is in the hands of a corrupt governmet with Hashim Thaci, who has been implicated in the harvesting of body parts of young Serb soldiers and the world remains silent.
Serb prisoners 'were stripped of their organs in Kosovo war' and,
Bernard Kouchner Involved In Albanian Organ Market
Bernard Kouchner is French President Sarkozy's Foreign Minister.
One could look at Zimbabwe and see a possible future of the USA.
It all depends on the path we choose. May we choose wisely.
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